If You Want To Be More Productive, You Need More Rest. Here’s How To Get It. | Claudia Hammond

Alan Cumming is an award-winning actor on the Broadway stage and on-screen, a New York Times best-selling author, director, comedian and activist. He's best known for his roles in Broadway's "Cabaret," TV’s "The Good Wife" and as Nightcrawler in "X-Men 2." During the interview with Dan Harris, Cumming talks about his meditation practice and his new book, "You Gotta Get Bigger Dreams: My Life in Stories and Pictures," out this month.

21 Sep 201635min

Elizabeth Vargas has been known throughout her 30-year career for her strong reporting around the world, her tough interviews and her steadiness during breaking news coverage. But now for the first time, Vargas reveals that she has also long struggled with alcoholism and anxiety. In her interview with Dan Harris and in her new book, "Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction," Vargas shares that she suffered repeated relapses and says meditation and reaching out to others has helped save her.

14 Sep 201645min

Chef Eric Ripert, of the famed Le Bernardin in New York City, is one of the world's best chefs, an Emmy-winning cooking show host and a cookbook author. But while Ripert was building a name for himself in the heat and the stress of a fine-dining restaurant kitchen, he also became a practicing Buddhist. The chef sat down with Dan Harris to talk about his daily meditation rituals, how he found Buddhism after being raised Catholic, and how he got to where he is today.

7 Sep 201650min

Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus have been through a lot together. They grew up together in Dayton, Ohio, both in families that struggled to make ends meet. They went on to climb the corporate ladder together and both made a comfortable living. So when Josh discovered minimalism, a practice in which you rid yourself of excess stuff to focus on personal happiness, it wasn't long before Ryan joined him. Today, the two childhood friends live in Montana and host a podcast, a website and have a film called "Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things," all devoted to capturing their minimalism experiences and to help others discover the practice.

31 Aug 20161h

Mike Gervais is a high-performance sports psychologist who works with athletes, most famously as the mindfulness coach for the Seattle Seahawks, on training the mind and body to work together under the intense pressure of competition. Gervais has helped pro-basketball players, golfers, swimmers, snowboarders, volleyball Olympians, hall of famers and a host of other elite athletes find new approaches to reaching peak performance from within. He talks with athletes and entrepreneurs about their experiences on his podcast, "Finding Mastery."

24 Aug 20161h 6min

A few years ago, Jesse Israel was a sophomore film student who had just signed an up-and-coming college band to a record label he co-founded out of his dorm room. Israel built that record label into a successful company -- then he decided to walk away from all of it and looked into ways he could "bring people together through shared interest." After toying with a few ideas, Israel came up with a plan to start a community for young adults to meet, meditate and "share quiet," he said.

17 Aug 201658min

Dr. Richie Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds, has been meditating for over 40 years. But it was the Dalai Lama himself who convinced Davidson to dedicate his life to researching the effects of meditation on the brain. Early in his career, Davidson said he "became a closet meditator" and the Dalai Lama "played a major role in me coming out of the closet and encouraging serious scientific research in this area." Davidson's team flew in monks from Tibet and Nepal for the study and asked them to meditate while undergoing scans. When they first looked at the scans, Davidson said the results were shocking.

10 Aug 20161h 5min

Oren J. Sofer, a former child actor turned longtime meditation teacher, was a 19-year-old college student in New York City when he said he felt things in his life were falling apart. "And I had heard about people going to India for study abroad and I had found out about a program where you wake up, 5am every morning, stay at a monastery, meditate twice a day, no drugs, no sex, no alcohol, and I just said, 'Sign me up,'" Sofer said. Fast forward to present day and now one of Sofer's specialties as a meditation teacher is showing people how to use Mindfulness to be better communicators.

3 Aug 20161h 8min